Ida Lupino Was a Cinema Hero Before Her Time

Quick question: How many women are nominated in the Best Director Oscar category this year? How many have ever been nominated? How many have won? And here are the sad answers: Not one woman nominated this year, only four in the whole history of the Academy Awards, and a single winner—Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker, in 2010.

It takes incredible perseverance, raw nerve, and sheer force of will to succeed as a woman on the other side of the camera even now, so imagine the challenges faced more than a half century ago. “I’m mad, they say. I am temperamental and dizzy and disagreeable. Well, let them talk. I can take it,” the director/producer/actor Ida Lupino once declared.

Lupino, who died in 1995, but would be 99 today, was a rare bird in the stifling climate of Hollywood and was at home on both sides of the lens: Check out her heartbreaking gun moll in 1941’s High Sierra; or the desperate, steely, pushy sister in The Hard Way from 1943. (Haven’t seen them? You must rent them at once!) But riveting as those performances are, far more impressive is the way Lupino found her way into the director’s chair.

Born into a famous British theatrical family, she started acting early: “My agent had told me that he was going to make me the Janet Gaynor of England—I was going to play all the sweet roles. Whereupon, at the tender age of 13, I set upon the path of playing nothing but hookers,” she recalled.

Lupino arrived in California in the early ’30s, where she was billed as “the English Jean Harlow.” Over the years, her feisty personality got her suspended from various productions—but that was okay!—her future lay in directing. With her husband, she started her own independent production company in the late ’40s, and began directing socially conscious films that took on subjects like unwed pregnancy and rape. She was the first woman to direct a film noir, and she is also responsible for a movie close to the hearts of so many young girls, The Trouble With Angels, starring Hayley Mills. (It made you want to become a nun, even if you were Jewish, like me.)

With the advent of television, Lupino lent her directorial skills to a long list of productions—Bewitched! Batman! Columbo!—including an iconic episode of the Twilight Zone. How many desperate housewives and frustrated mommies sat in their living rooms in the ’60s, watching these shows, and never imagining that a fellow female was responsible for their favorite programs?

“Often, I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way, I got more cooperation,” Lupino once mused. In truth, she knew more than virtually any of them.